What hardware is still missing in the Home Assistant ecosystem?

[coral nacelle]

Hey all,

We’re a small hardware team exploring products built specifically for Home Assistant (high quality, local control).

What hardware do you wish existed but can’t find today? Or what’s out there but just doesn’t do the job right?

Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

[grim lagoon]

Ooh. Garden things. Reliable outdoor (as in full sun/rain exposure) sensors in general. Mailbox sensor (there are some DIY versions of this, I've been "planning to" DIY it for months - basically a contact sensor with an antenna extension to route outside the faraday mail-cage would do). For all that, I'd love z-wave devices.

On the opposite end, I wish half my indoor z-wave/wifi/BLE devices were PoE instead. PoE temperature/humidity/lux/maybe motion sensors? Yes please. PoE air pollutant sensors? Oh yeah.

[glass adder]

Zigbee Rain sensor and Zigbee RF remote 🙂

[untold juniper]

Booby trap sensors 😉 make it quick, mother-in-law coming next week

[thin plaza]

There is only 1 non-alibaba/etc zigbee smart dog feeder (though many more for cats)

[coral nacelle]

Thanks so much for all the suggestions. I’ll ask follow up questions one at a time to stay focused on each topic.

@grim lagoon , any examples of outdoor sensors you wish they were HA compatible? Any brand or specific product names?

[grim lagoon]

I don’t know about products. Problem isn’t HA compatibility, it’s existence and reliability. Rain sensors, soil moisture sensors, etc. I was looking for a beam break sensor for my driveway at one point too. Just can’t really find much other than obscure WiFi/cloud devices I don’t want to deal with.

[livid badge]

I'd love an outdoor door/gate sensor that works with zigbee.

[karmic turtle]

Have you tried the Ikea ones?

[burnt pulsar]

How about a zigbee repeater device with a real antenna for outdoor. Plug it in near the garden and then the plant sensors, etc. would work.
I'm talking a real half wave antenna like the ZWA-2.

[regal quartz]

RF and IR Bridge for ESPHome.
It's relatively simple, but still requires a few experiments. The SONOFF RF Bridge is already available on the market, but it's based on an ESP8266 and a dedicated SOC for signal decoding. So, if I wanted to create my own protocol, I had to solder workarounds, and then I could only manage one of the five devices because the ESP8266 couldn't handle all at once. Ultimately, I built my own device using an ESP32, but that was even more fun. I'd love to see the out-of-box solution.

https://github.com/orgs/home-assistant/discussions/1397

Similar request.

I've also been building a few electric scales connected to ESP recently, because I want to weigh the amount of gas in the CO2 bottle, the amount of water in the kettle (Xiaomi Kettle Pro 2 has remote boiling, but it doesn't measure the water level, so you can burn the kettle), the amount of food in the cat bowl.

But generally speaking, a lot of things could be measured with a scale, but the cheapest kitchen scale with BT costs as much as 8 classic kitchen scale, o I decided that it would be cheaper to buy a ready-made scale and add ESP.

[untold juniper]

a VoiceVE (VideoEdition)

[livid badge]

I've only seen the indoor ones. I'll have to see if the store near me has other varieties.

[dreamy harbor]

The Ikea Parasoll contact sensors, surprisingly, are IP44 rated... however, don't buy them unless you want to tear your hair out

They can randomly crash and you'll need to power cycle them to get them to work again

[karmic turtle]

I've been lucky then, using at least 4 and working perfectly. But you need to use the Ikea rechargeable batteries 🤷‍♂️

[dreamy harbor]

How long have you been using them for? Every few weeks at least one of mine will go into a leave/rejoin loop that drains the battery

[karmic turtle]

For a year. What batteries do you use?

[dreamy harbor]

the ikea rechargeables

[karmic turtle]

Maybe a faulty device?

[dreamy harbor]

Seems unlikely to have 4 faulty ones

[karmic turtle]

A bad batch? Can you change them by Ikea guarantee? In Spain we can do that for 3 years after the purchase

[cold kayak]

never had any issue with the 3 Parasoll sensors i have, using rechargeable batteries actually recommend them to people quite often, what does give me issues is the Vallhorn PIR sensors that are sometimes really unresponsive.

[unkempt hinge]

In-wall energy monitoring outlets - no control, just energy monitoring. Alternately, the same, but with control - BOTH physical and remote. Alternately, the same, but with an actual circuit breaker.
Reliable dimmer switches with energy monitoring. For these type of things, Z-wave first, zigbee second, since Z-wave devices can generally be depended upon to work when Home Assistant is down.

Small animal motion sensors, particularly hardwired - i.e. detecting rats, mice, or bats (mostly bats) at 20-30 feet. Hardwired motion sensors in general are rare (3Reality motion nightlights use USB power, actually, as one example; Zooz has 12-24v outdoor versions as well). High amperage, motor-capable power plugs with power monitoring are very rare.

Ductwork control - 4" round, 6" round inline dampers to control airflow, options to control vent covers (closing vents, opening them) also to control airflow.

[ruby geode]

I actually recently tried to integrate a 0-5v analog pressure transducer sensor into home assistant to keep an eye on my home water pressure, and finding an off-the-shelf ADC board to do it was surprisingly difficult. I ended up having to build my own out of an m5stack nanoc6 dev kit and an I2C ADC module that they sell, to include writing a driver for esphome and doing all the voltage calibration myself. Ideally I would have liked a product where I could just plug the ends of any sensor harness into a terminal block with sense, ground and +5v broken out, pre-loaded with an esphome build with the appropriate drivers and calibration offsets included

(edit: to be clear, not calibration for the sensor itself since there are a bunch of different types you could plug in, but just to ensure that the ADC voltage is correct accounting for any front-end circuitry like voltage dividers or amplifiers)

[coral nacelle]

Is there any specific feeder you wish it was Zigbee enabled?

[untold juniper]

a lot of people are doing lightning with wled, but i could not find a device that combines an esp32 with LAN and ADC / AUDIO LINE-IN input that sends info to wled controllers to do audio-reactive stuff. there are DIY solutions, but not ready to go with line input (3,5jack) and LAN..

[mental fractal]

I know it’s probably not what the OP is interested in, but I’d love something like the Voice PE but with hifi quality audio.

[untold juniper]

need of a good DAC though..

[mental fractal]

It’s the all of it really. Enclosure and driver/loud speaker itself are just as important I imagine.

[scenic shell]

https://futureproofhomes.net/products/satellite1-pcb-dev-kit - this is one of the only “semi-prebuilt” options right now

[coral nacelle]

@nick, there is standard 48V PoE and passive 24V. Which one is preferred? I think the standard one requires more components and it’s more expensive.

[coral nacelle]

thank you for sharing this link. I understand this board has some useful sensors, but other than that do you see any advantages for this board over conference room mic array/speakers already in the market? I know commercial systems are closed, but in terms of hardware they are kinda similar. What do you think?

[dreamy harbor]

For these type of things, Z-wave first, zigbee second, since Z-wave devices can generally be depended upon to work when Home Assistant is down.
assuming you're talking about Z-Wave associations here, Zigbee has an equivalent called binding btw

[scenic shell]

The major advantage I see right now is that they have enclosures that you can 3D print with open schematics and are also planning on selling them soon to create a capable speaker + voice assistant. It’s also a dedicated project for HA voice which is nice 🙂

[dreamy harbor]

@coral nacelle I've been wanting a Zigbee single color LED controller (similar to this but not Tuya) that doesn't suck forever now

[worthy talon]

And here I am wanting kinda the opposite - a ha voice on a stick that I plug my own io into (or in software for aes67/Dante/...) so I can tie in the DSP that already runs mics and speakers around the house 🙃

[regal quartz]

@worthy talon If you have a slightly more complex device setup then you might want to look at: https://github.com/OHF-Voice/linux-voice-assistant
I’m not sure whether it can integrate with AES67 or Dante, but since it runs on Linux, the chances are definitely better than with an ESP32.

[worthy talon]

oooo. Thank you 🙂 My silly thoughts last night got into "well, I'm seeing 4s processing time but I wonder if I "pre compile" some common commands to the same format that the wake words use if I can make it check those first and be overall faster and I can integrate my home DSP to help with noise isolation"

[stoic matrix]

I haven't read all the replies so these may have been said already, but if so, just count these as another vote for them. The two things I have been wanting are "pressure pads" (so I can place them under my mattress). It could run automations when I get in/out of bed. This would also need weight detection so if my wife or kids get into my bed it will know it's not me. I would put one pad on either side of the bed, one for me and one for my wife to trigger different automations.
Second would be an Energy Monitoring Smart Plug for a dryer in the U.S. (240v?). Setting up dryer automations is extremely difficult. I did just get a vibration sensor that seems to work, but it's not a solution for 100% of dryers.

[worthy talon]

I don't think you're ever going to see the energy monitoring in a plug through factor for a dryer. Without getting into the complexities of building and listing such a thing, there's just too many socket variations and, because of that, dryer plugs are just whips that are field installed - which means it's really easy to add a CT to the dryer. So much so that dryer exhaust booster fans are sold with CTs to install on the wiring in the dryer.

Tuya pressure sensors exist.

[ruby geode]

Fwiw it isn't a "plug", but there are a few options on the market for heavy duty smart relays with energy monitoring, e.g. https://www.getzooz.com/zen78-high-power-relay/